Christinne Muschi - Canadian PressWhat a brilliant time to be alive. The four-nations hockey game between Canada and the United States (U.S.) on February 21 brought us three fights in the first nine seconds of the game.
Have you ever seen the Calgary-born, New York City (NYC) Ranger Matt Rempe play? He seemingly loves to fight more than score goals and that is exactly what hockey should be about — the fights. No need to do fancy stick work, and impress the crows with your speed. All you need to do is start swinging. That’s good hockey.
As a lifelong Edmonton Oilers fan, it feels sacrilegious to praise the playing of the Toronto Maple Leafs. However, the amount of fights that Winnipeg-born Ryan Reaves has been getting into is absolutely fabulous. After looking at some fights/aggressive player data, I am noticing a slight trend of a lot of aggressive players being from super cold areas. Perhaps to maximize our games-to-fight ratios we should make hockey classes mandatory and free for everyone in very cold areas. That ought to cook up some great players and fighters.
A league that gets the glory of fights in hockey is the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). The league allows for more checking and is absolutely optimized for penalty-based entertainment with its jailbreak rule. Despite the PWHL being quite new, there have still been some nasty fights and crazy hits. You may think PWHL players and women’s hockey don’t rock the boat, but you’d be completely wrong. They get dirty with high sticking and slamming each other around. If you enjoy glorious rough-housing on ice, you have to watch the Toronto PWHL team, the Toronto Sceptres.
From a lucrative financial standpoint, all hockey managers and team owners should be encouraging fights. Because the more fights there are, the more detracted all of the viewers are from how much their arena pints are costing them. Additionally, with more fights, the viewer is more “locked in.” They become more likely to spend more money on merchandise they don’t need for the sake of the “vibes.” Plus, they’re likely to drink more because the fights are making the game more interesting to watch. Thus, fights are financially beneficial good for the teams, for the arenas, and for the fans because of the value of entertainment. Therefore there is quite literally no downside to gratuitous violence on skates, and definitely don’t fact-check me on that.
The clean and simple reason that hockey fights are so brilliant and are absolutely necessary is because it keeps everyone in check. The players get to self-police bad behaviour. Furthermore, it is what the people want. If you have ever seen small-town hockey games, you know that everyone is truly just egging it on. Or even if you pay to see a professional game, I know for a fact that you either said out loud or thought to yourself “Oh, boy I sure hope there is a fight tonight” on your way to the game.
Thus, because of our shared love for fights, I believe that every game should result in a fight like the 20-minute light shutting-off-worthy brawl that happened during the 1987 World Junior Hockey Championships in then-Czechoslovakia between Canada and the Soviet Union. If that’s too much to ask for, I would settle for at least one good fight lasting at least one minute in every game. At least two in all of the playoff games.
More hockey fights, for the sake of the people!
